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Stabat mater

Introduction

Hans Volkmann, Astorga’s great champion and biographer at the start of the twentieth century, dated the Stabat mater, purely (and rather debatably) on stylistic grounds, to around 1707. There are equally valid arguments for any date up to around 1730. Whatever, throughout we see Astorga’s gift for writing warm melodies, typical of the Neapolitan style of the time. He also captures the melancholy of this most desolate of sacred texts and, especially in the choruses, demonstrates a thorough grasp of counterpoint, but never at the expense of musicality. The work sets twenty of the standard three-line verses, connecting four for the third, double-duet movement, but otherwise using pairs for the independent movements. In his scoring Astorga takes a variety of combinations of chorus, solo, duet and trio. The mixture of melody with melancholy, sweetness tempered with mild chromaticism, old-fashioned polyphony contrasted with Neapolitan cantilena, a surprisingly Germanic use of motivic development in the bel canto bass solo ‘Fac me plagis vulnerari’ and the final, quietly operatic chorus which gently directs the listener away from the Virgin’s sorrow towards the Carmelite missal’s more optimistic ‘palm of victory’, all show an enormously attractive musical style. Composers and their work often enjoy a bumpy progression through history, but few paths can have been as bizarre as that of Astorga: in the eighteenth century a musical nobleman, during the nineteenth century a folk hero, and in the twentieth—oblivion.

Recordings

A recording of two extremely beautiful settings of the Stabat mater—the Astorga is better-known than the Boccherini, but if any recording proves that a piece should be neglected no longer, this must surely be it.» More

This album is not yet available for downloadSACDA67108Super-Audio CD — Deleted

A recording of two extremely beautiful settings of the Stabat mater—the Astorga is better-known than the Boccherini, but if any recording proves that a piece should be neglected no longer, this must surely be it.» More